Page 210 of Alessio

He looked up, meeting Alessio’s gaze across the room. “Yeah?”

“You did well.”

“I feel like death.”

Alessio grinned. “You look like it, too.”

He cleared his throat. “I spent my eighteenth birthday in those rooms.”

Silence coated the space between the two of them. Not for long, though.

“I spent mine watching you,” Alessio returned.

“Oh.”

Alessio offered the knife again. “You’re probably too weak, but you can try, if you want.”

“I thought rich hands weren’t meant to touch those, only pay someone else to do it.”

“I can be wrong sometimes.”

“Can you?”

Alessio gave him a look.

“Can you really?” Corrado pressed.

“Don’t get used to it,” Alessio told him.

Corrado smiled. “Good to know.”

“I know what you said. Eighteen, Dare.”

The current source of Alessio’s irritation—although if he were being an honest man, he had a lot of those annoyances lately—didn’t turn away from the electronic map that covered the touchscreen on his office wall. He waved a hand over his shoulder, like Alessio was a fly he was trying to bat away.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Annoying, isn’t it?” Dare returned. “You do the same thing to literally everyone else, Les. If you don’t like when people ignore you, perhaps you should attempt to stop doing it to us. You’re beyond the annoying stage where I can use your age as an excuse for your bad fucking attitude. Besides, what I need more than you out on an assignment is for you to listen.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t all get what we want.”

“Keep thinking that way, and see where it gets you.”

Alessio glared at the back of Dare’s head, willing the man to combust right on the spot. Sometimes, it was the little things that inspired the worst kinds of reactions in him. This was certainly one of those things.

Again, if he were being honest, there were many.

This was a big one, though.

“I went through all that training for you to keep me—”

“I have several job offers on the table right now,” Dare interjected, still seemingly unwilling to turn around and face Alessio in the doorway. “And while some will go to others, because they have the specific skills for those assignments, I am deciding which one might be best for you. I don’t take every job that comes in from clients who don’t have a contract with a specific League member, and a lot of these are exactly that.”

“So, I’ll have an assignment soon, then?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Fuck.